In preparation for surgery next: final pastry for a week

Now I am consuming my coffee on my break, along with this raspberry pinwheel from House of Bread. It is the last pastry I can have with my coffee for a week. I lost 37 pounds during the course of my summer 2012 surgeries and hospitalizations and the doctor suggested I keep my weight there. But I have gained 27 of those pounds back. And it was a real pleasure doing so. But now the doctor says it will be helpful if I lose 10 pounds before I go back into surgery. So I decided to pretty much give-up on my pastries. Most days, I have a pastry with coffee and then I eat some bread a few times throughout the day too. But if I try to break from them altogether I will fail. I will now allow myself one per week.

Advised to the contrary, Carmen intends to stay at Metro Cafe

When I reached Metro Cafe, I found enough inspiration to take another picture. Carmen. She was my inspiration. She is telling me how a financial adviser advised her to leave Metro Cafe behind now that Scot is buried, and just go be a hockey mom. But no, she plans to do no such thing. "Metro is my life," she told me. It is where she feels comfortable. It is where her friends stop in to buy coffee and visit and chat. It is the place Scot built for her. Were she to leave, Wasilla would be a diminished community.

School bus = inspiration?

This morning, I speculated that I might not take another picture beyond my sleepy, brain-dead image of coffee being poured into my cup at breakfast at Abby's. I did allow for the possibility of inspiration arising somewhere. I don't know if you would call it inspiration or not, but as regular readers know I have a policy that I never let a school bus pass by me unphotographed, if I can help it. So here I am, driving to Metro to pick up my afternoon coffee and lo and behold – a school bus!

Day begins in a haze – a note on comments

This day has begun. I begin it in a blur, my dull brain wracked by headache. I feel sluggish, incapable of taking a photograph. Maybe this snap will be the only image I produce today. Maybe my mind will spring to life later and I might shoot something. Or I might just take an obligatory snapshot or two even though I feel no inspiration. We'll see.

I note that for some reason, Squarespace has quit notifying me when there is a comment pending. So I apologize to those people who have left comments only to have them sitting for a long time before I approve them. I just didn't know they were there.

The third surgery looms - what will be the fate of Obamacare?

Here I am, earlier today, about to walk to my surgeon's office at the end of this hallway. Those who were with me on my blog on June 30, 2012, will recall how I went through colon surgery. The fundamental surgery went well, but the incision became infected and blew apart. I then had to have emergency surgery and endure two more hospitalizations. Instead of the three-week recovery period I had been told to expect, I lost the entire summer of 2012.

I was left with a gigantic abdominal hernia. The doctor said he would repair it, but wanted to give me a year from the original surgery to regain my strength. I had lost the entire summer of 2012 and did not want to lose the summer of 2013. He said we could do it in February. Then Kivgiq happened in February. I could not miss Kivgiq. I have been going nonstop since and have had no time for surgery. Today, my surgeon told me It's got to be done soon or the muscle left around the hernia will be too degraded to work with.

As a self-employed person, I carried my own health insurance for over 15 years and invested about $150,000 into it. Then my insurance company forced me out before my colon problem was diagnosed. Thanks to the unusually good amount of work that has come my way over the past year, I have been able to carry the debt and still live decently, but it has been a bit of a nightmare. I was hoping to wait to get my next surgery until January, when I can enroll in another insurance plan, without pre-existing conditions, under the Affordable Healthcare Act - Obamacare. The doctor says I can probably make it until January.

Yet, there is a group of Obama-hating politicians with great health insurance plans paid for by my tax dollars who so badly want to prevent me from purchasing my own healthcare plan they would be willing to destroy the good faith and credibility of the United States government and tank the slowly recovering economy they have already hobbled.